[PatrickHenry]

A provocative speech/essay by a prominent journalist:

An Eye On Power By Bill Moyers t r u t h o u t | Address Tuesday 25 May 2004 Delivered at the Newspaper Guild/Communication Workers of America dinner on May 19, 2004.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/052604B.shtml

the greatest moments in journalism have come not when journalists made common cause with power, but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.

Is an independent press worth demanding? Worth fighting for? Do any of you think the US has an independent press today? Read on...

why, when we pause to celebrate it, as we are tonight, why despite plenty of lip service on every ritual occasion to freedom of the press-why are we so uneasy, so uncertain, so anxious for our craft? Partly it's because of the secrecy. The secrecy today is so thick as to be all but impenetrable. In earlier times there were padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers as our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with blunt instruments of the law. Now, the classifier's 'top secret' stamp, used indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a writ of arrest. It's so bad the president and CEO of the Associated Press, Tom Curley, last week called publicly for a media advocacy center to lobby in Washington for an open government. "You don't need to have your notebook snatched by a policeman," he said, "to know that keeping an eye on government has lately gotten a lot harder."

Is there increasing secrecy in government, in your opinion? If so, are there legitimate reasons for increased secrecy or is it that officialdom is abusing its authority and wishes to have their misdeeds concealed?

It's not just government that's squeezing out this news. Some of the media giants are doing it themselves. As they consolidate ownership they are shrinking their news holes, isolating public affairs far from prime-time. A study by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America reports that nearly two-thirds of today's newspaper markets are monopolies.

Are media monopolies contributing to the stated "press freedom" guaranteed in the First Amendment?

it won't be long before America is reduced to half a dozen major print organizations. According to the Non-Partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism, newspapers have 2,200 fewer employees than in 1990. The number of full-time radio news employees dropped by 44 percent between 1994 and 2000. The number of broadcast network correspondents has dropped by one third since the 1980s. And the number of TV network foreign bureaus is down by half. Except for 60 Minutes on CBS, the network prime time newsmagazines "in no way could be said to cover major news of the day." Furthermore, the report finds that 68 percent of the news on cable news channels was 'repetitious accounts of previously reported stories without any new information."

Aah, 60 Minutes, my favorite show. The cable news shows run 24/7, but are they really contributing anything to public awareness or just background noise?

Meanwhile, as secrecy grows, and media conglomerates put more and more power in fewer and fewer hands, we have witnessed the rise of a new phenomenon-a quasi-official partisan press ideologically linked to an authoritarian administration that is in turn the ally and agent of powerful financial and economic interests that consider transparencies a threat to their hegemony over public opinion. This convergence dominates the marketplace of political ideas in a phenomenon unique in our history. Stretching from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch's empire to the nattering nabobs of know-nothing radio to a legion of think tanks bought and paid for by corporations circling the honey pots of government, a vast echo chamber resounds with a conformity of opinions, serving a partisan worldview cannot be proven wrong because it admits no evidence to the contrary. When you challenge them with evidence to the contrary-when you try to hold their propaganda to scrutiny-you're likely to wind up in the modern equivalent of a medieval iron maiden, between the covers, that is, of an Ann Coulter tirade, or wake up in an underground cell at FOX News, force fed leftovers from a Roger Ailes snack, and required for 24 hours a day to stare at photographs of Rupert Murdoch on the walls of the cell while listening to a piped-in Bill O'Reilly singing the Hallelujah Chorus in praise of himself.

OK, a little polemical, but it describes a certain mentality that I encounter often right here on volconvo. Not naming any names, but you know who I mean. Come on out and fight!